Scientific American Mind offers up a hearty helping of science, but for the most voracious brain buffs six issues a year may not be enough. Fortunately, plenty of extra crumbs of brain candy can be picked up online in the blogosphere.

. . .

For a blog with more personality, try The Neurocritic, which is always sardonic (and occasionally scathing). According to his bio, the anonymous author has led a hard-knock life, and he works out his hostility by excoriating scientists and journalists who dare to sensationalize findings. In November he jumped on the authors of a New York Times op-ed over the dubious results of their fMRI study regarding people’s perceptions of the 2008 presidential candidates.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.

Here's just one horrifying example that appears to go well beyond PTSD:

Specialist Brandon Bare, a soldier who saw fierce combat in Iraq, was sent home early after suffering head injuries from a grenade attack. He was placed in an intensive outpatient psychological treatment program, where he told counselors about the difficulty he was having controlling his anger toward his wife, Nabila Bare, 18. On July 12, 2005, after Mr. Bare saw his wife e-mailing another man, he stabbed her more than 71 times, carved a pentagram into her stomach and wrote a message with her blood on the refrigerator: "Satan said she deserved it." After confessing to Army investigators, Mr. Bare was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. A military psychiatrist said Specialist Bare exhibited the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The victim's parents -- her father was a soldier, too -- were angered by defense efforts to portray Specialist Bare as a scarred war veteran betrayed by his wife. "He is not a hero," said Irene Neverette, the victim's mother. "He is a monster, a criminal."

18 year old Nabila Bare, savagely murdered by her husband, who appeared to have experienced a psychotic break after returning from Iraq

Here's another:

Jacob Burgoyne, a Fort Benning soldier who served as an Army gunner in Iraq, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the killing of Specialist Richard Davis in Georgia in 2003. Two other soldiers were convicted of murder in the case, which inspired the 2007 film, "In the Valley of Elah."

Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.

Mr. Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. ...

... Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.

Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder...

The incident on the firing range was the first “red flag,” as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Mr. Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.

. . .

Nobody believes that Mr. Smith’s killing of Ms. Speirs can be justified. But many involved in the case have wondered aloud, at some point, whether Ms. Speirs’s life might have been spared if the marine’s combat trauma had been treated more aggressively.

Ms. Speirs’s parents do not engage in such speculation. They view their daughter as a victim of fatal domestic violence and not as an indirect casualty of the war in Iraq.

"This investigation would seem to indicate there is a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment."

-- Lead researcher Dr Tania Singer

At the time, I said...

Well then, that explains why the public outrage directed at Lynndie England was so much greater than that directed at the Abu Ghraib ringleader (and father of Ms. England's child), former prison guard Charles A. Graner.

Right wing pundits have been seeking to draw special notice to Private Lynndie England. Though only one of many sadistic individuals involved in the horrific acts at the prison who were photographed, England has been on the receiving end of the most invective. Though her fellow sadists were just as cruel, England is getting all of this extra attention because she is an easier target. England is an easier target because she is a woman.

Where am I going with all this? I don't know. What have Human Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience told us about preventing torture, murder, war?

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Figure 1 (Benuzzi et al., 2008). Sample frames extracted from some video clips representing painful (left), disgusting (middle), and neutral (right) stimuli. All video clips began with 200–400 ms of a static hand or foot picture, followed by a stimulus rapidly approaching and contacting the skin. Needles and knifes apparently punctured the hand or foot, but actually they did not: the images were digitally corrected to simulate bleeding. [NOTE: blood not shown here. Perhaps the authors made use of this classic site, Jarrett's Blood Splatter Photoshop Tutorial.]

Think I made up the title of this post? No, it's the real title of a journal article published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience:

Looking at still images of body parts in situations that are likely to cause pain has been shown to be associated with activation in some brain areas involved in pain processing. Because pain involves both sensory components and negative affect, it is of interest to explore whether the visually evoked representations of pain and of other negative emotions overlap. By means of event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, here we compare the brain areas recruited, in female volunteers, by the observation of painful, disgusting, or neutral stimuli delivered to one hand or foot. Several cortical foci were activated by the observation of both painful and disgusting video clips, including portions of the medial prefrontal cortex, anterior, mid-, and posterior cingulate cortex, left posterior insula, and right parietal operculum. Signal changes in perigenual cingulate and left anterior insula were linearly related to the perceived unpleasantness, when the individual differences in susceptibility to aversive stimuli were taken into account. Painful scenes selectively induced activation of left parietal foci, including the parietal operculum, the postcentral gyrus, and adjacent portions of the posterior parietal cortex. In contrast, brain foci specific for disgusting scenes were found in the posterior cingulate cortex. These data show both similarities and differences between the brain patterns of activity related to the observation of noxious or disgusting stimuli. Namely, the parietal cortex appears to be particularly involved in the recognition of noxious environmental stimuli, suggesting that areas involved in sensory aspects of pain are specifically triggered by observing noxious events.

The Neurocritic is NEITHER Dead NOR Alive. Or both Dead AND Alive. Plus, as promised, today we'll cover "Tips for Manipulating the IAT."

You have completed the study.

Your Result

Your data suggest little to no automatic identification with Alive compared to Dead.

Your results, summarized above, are an implicit indicator of whether you are alive or dead. Implicit measures are superior to self-report because the latter is notoriously unreliable. People may report being alive because social pressures suggest that it is more desirable to be alive. Also, people may not have introspective access to their animate-status, making such self-report untrustworthy.

In a prior study, we found that self-report was particularly unreliable for people who were dead suggesting that implicit measures will be especially useful for this population.

Importantly, your results may be influenced by cultural norms rather than your personal animate status. Cultural norms are strongly biased toward "alive" so if you show a stronger identity with alive over dead, you should be suspicious that the result may be due to this extrapersonal influence.

Also, these associations are inherently "relative" meaning that we cannot estimate your alive associations separately from your dead associations. So, if you are both or neither, we cannot tell the difference. Finally, if you hang out with a lot of dead people, then your effects might be due to strong associations of others with dead rather than yourself with alive.

Cautions aside, this implicit measure of dead identity shall become the new standard assessment. For too long, the low-reliability finger-finding-pulse method has errantly allowed dead people to continue 'living' among us. This must stop.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is all the rage in social psychology as a measure of hidden "unconscious" biases or prejudices that most people are afraid to admit to themselves (or to reveal in polite company within academic settings). The Situationist linked to an article in the APS Observer:

In a time where social desirability confounds are of pervasive concern in psychological research, one of the IAT’s greatest merits appears to be resistance to faking. Studies have demonstrated that participants rarely devise a successful faking strategy. It appears that taking one’s time is the easiest way to doctor results. “It does work,” Greenwald says of the strategy, “but it also tends to be detectable statistically.”

In Monday's entry, The Neurocritic was Human, All Too Human (AND Alien). My "faking" strategy was simple, and relied on neither deliberate slowing of response times nor a long-standing affiliation with aliens. When SELF and ALIEN were mapped to the same key, I merely said to myself, "I'm an alien." This strategy was transient, applied only when those stimulus-response mappings were the same, not when SELF and ALIEN were mapped to different keys. I used the same strategy for the Dead or Alive IAT. In both cases, I responded as quickly and as accurately as possible. So what's up?

A recent study by De Houwer and colleagues (2007) demonstrated that participants can easily fake their results in an IAT for newly-acquired attitudes about fictitious social groups (Niffites and Luupites), when instructed to do so by the experimenters. The subjects were able to manipulate both the magnitude and the direction of the IAT effect. The authors raised the general point that "implicit" measures of attitudes may not be entirely implicit. Furthermore,

The present study is the first to demonstrate successful faking in the IAT when participants perform an IAT for the first time during an experimental session. One explanation for this apparent discrepancy is that we focussed on novel attitudes whereas previous studies looked at overlearned attitudes and associations. It could be that it is easier to fake novel attitudes because it is not necessary to counteract well-established existing attitudes toward those same attitude objects. However, before strong conclusions can be drawn about this issue, new studies are needed in which faking attitudes toward novel and familiar attitude objects are compared directly.

Granted, it's preferable that IAT-takers are naïve to the purposes of the study, which is why "Bones & Johnson" (2007) lamented the fact that

the population of new participants available to take IATs will expire by the year 2023. Shrill, doomsday proposals from IAT experts involve rationing the precious pool of remaining IAT novices or other naive strategies. ... Building on our prior experience of adapting the IAT for measuring infant cognition and rooting out aliens among us, we demonstrate that new pools of participant resources—the unborn and passed on—are available, if we take the time to develop the methods to exploit them.

But if one is fully cognizant of the true purpose of any IAT, does that render your results invalid, since the test is not immune to manipulation? What do the experts say about that? Here's Brian A. Nosek in The Bias Finders (Bower, 2006):

Several investigations suggest that it's difficult to initially manipulate one's IAT score. However, people who take the IAT many times or who receive explicit cheating instructions can fake their scores. "I've taken the IAT so many times that I know how to get any score I want to on it," Nosek says.

Wah! I'm not so SPECIAL, after all (even though my prior IAT tally for all of the 21st century is 10 at most [not 100] -- and zero in the last few years). At any rate, I'm not a social psychologist, so I was was initially unaware of the [nearly] true extent of this edict:

With the Association for Psychological Science's new ethical standards requiring that all research studies include an Implicit Association Test (IAT)...

While the IAT has been publicized (by its authors!) as a measure of implicit attitudes, and even more, as a measure of implicit prejudice, there is no real evidence that it measures attitudes, much less prejudices. In fact, it's not at all clear what it measures, though the fact that its psychometric properties are pretty well defined at least implies that it measures something. On top of that, the IAT (like all of the other implicit tests) has serious methodological flaws that are currently being discussed in the literature. It's just irresponsible to publicize work, and claim that it does something very particular, when the work is still in the early stages and it's not at all clear what it's actually doing...

We asked participants to imagine that a researcher would provide them with positive or negative information about fictitious social groups. Half of the participants were asked to act in such a way that they would conform to the expectations of the researcher. The other participants were asked to behave in the manner opposite to what the researcher expected. Participants then completed an IAT designed to measure the newly formed attitudes toward the fictitious social groups. The direction of the IAT effect depended on the faking instructions. The results call for caution when using the IAT to study the development of implicit attitudes.

Monday, January 21, 2008

The Neurocritic is Human AND Alien. Coming soon: "Tips for Manipulating the IAT."

You have completed the study.

Your Result

Your data suggest little to no automatic identification with Human compared to Alien.

If your results, provided above, indicate a stronger identity with alien relative to human, then you are probably an alien. Self-reports of humanness sometimes differ from the results revealed by the IAT because either aliens do not want to admit to being an alien either because of plans for world domination or because of low collective self-esteem. Also, one's implicit alien identity can be a surprise to the test taker because "he" or "she" did not know previously about being an alien. These cases are surprisingly common and are likely due to memory impairment or alieodissociative identity disorder (not yet recognized by the APA diagnostic manual).

A few humans - mostly bleeding heart liberals - implicitly identify with aliens more than humans because of a uncontrollable need to disidentify with the ingroup.

In either case, if you show an implicit alien identity, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is interested to speak with you.

If you instead show an implicit human identity, then it is likely that you are in implicit denial. Why would you have taken this test if you were not an alien? Please report yourself to DHS anyway.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Imagine being part of a psychology study in which you are filmed making short speeches in front of a camera. You're told that the purpose of the study is to investigate the eye movements that people make while speaking. You wear a plain black t-shirt and sit opposite the exerimenter, who records you when you talk about three themes related to your own historyand experience (e.g., your hometown) for about a minute each.

Then it turns out the real purpose of the study is to record your reactions to less-than-flattering still images of yourself gleaned from the videos! How were these embarrassing images selected?

We established the following six criteria for the "badness" of each image: first, whether the eyes were totally or partly closed (eyes); second, whether the gaze was averted (gaze); third, whether the mouth was unnaturally open (mouth); fourth, whether the lip stuck out (lip); fifth, whether the chin stuck out (chin); and sixth, whether the expression was strange (expression). "Bad" images that met some of these criteria contained awkward facial expressions, such as those in which the participants showed the whites of their eyes or had their mouths wide open. By contrast, "good" images did not meet any of the criteria, and appeared as if the subjects had posed for a photograph rather than the images having been taken from a video recording. These sets of 21 images were used as the stimuli for the SELF condition in the subsequent fMRI experiment. By contrast, in the OTHERS condition, 21 face images that were selected from three gender-matched unfamiliar individuals (seven images per person) were used.

You can see where this is going: the authors (Morita et al., 2008) wanted to see how the brain reacts to seeing a terrible picture of yourself. They were also interested in how this relates to a bunch of hyphenated "self-" words: self-recognition, self-face recognition, self-consciousness, self-conscious emotions, "public self-consciousness", self-awareness, "public self-awareness", "meta self-awareness",self-esteem, and self-evaluation. I think I'll stick to embarrassment, rather than a meta-meta discussion of self-*.

In the scanner, the task was to rate, from 1 to 7, how photogenic each face was, for images of both SELF and OTHER (i.e., other participants in the experiment). After scanning, the subjects performed a self-paced task in which they rated the same faces on photogenic-ness (again), embarrassment, valence, and arousal.

To make a long story short, some of the results were not surprising at all:

Figure 2 (Morita et al., 2008). Relationship between the ratings of embarrassment and the photogenic scores for each face.

People are quite embarrassed by bad pictures of themselves, but of others...not so much. The key fMRI finding was from the SELF vs. OTHERS contrast, as shown below, namely that greater activity in the right middle inferior frontal gyrus (mIFG) was associated with lower embarrassment scores.

Figure 5 (A) Brain activity in the right mIFG negatively correlated with the embarrassment ratings for individuals' own faces. A random effects statistical parametric activation map (SPM{t}) was overlaid on a canonical transverse section. The height threshold was set at p < .01 at each voxel level for display purposes. The light blue outlines indicate areas that were significantly activated by the SELF versus OTHERS contrast.

So really, the title of this post should be "I Look Terrible! My Right mIFG Is SO Embarrassed and Suppressed!" Hmm. The authors have a string of "self-" words to explain this finding:

As the standard for an individual's face appears to be recognized as one's own representative face, it could be the most self-relevant stimulus. Individuals whose own faces are rated as "good" tend to be close to the standard and these individuals experience relatively little embarrassment. Therefore, in the current study, an increase in the right mIFG activity associated with reduced embarrassment would reflect increased relevance to the standard self, which could be regarded as self-relevance. In addition, the activity of the right mIFG did not depend on public self-consciousness; this was in agreement with our finding that the extent of embarrassment was not associated with public self-consciousness. Taken together, our results suggest that the right mIFG is selectively engaged in the self-evaluation, reflecting self-relevance.

OK, then. Did any brain region show a positive correlation with embarrassment ratings? No...

At any rate, the present experiment was conducted with Japanese participants. The cultural contributions to the degree of embarrassment, self-consciousness, self-evaluation, self-*, etc. -- and whether the participants are early rejects from Pop/Pinoy/Deutschland/Canadian/American Idol, and how this influences right frontal activation -- would be interesting topics for future study.

Morita T, Itakura S, Saito DN, Nakashita S, Harada T, Kochiyama T, Sadato N. (2008). The Role of the Right Prefrontal Cortex in Self-evaluation of the Face: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study. J Cog Neurosci. 20:342-355.Individuals can experience negative emotions (e.g., embarrassment) accompanying self-evaluation immediately after recognizing their own facial image, especially if it deviates strongly from their mental representation of ideals or standards. The aim of this study was to identify the cortical regions involved in self-recognition and self-evaluation along with self-conscious emotions. To increase the range of emotions accompanying self-evaluation, we used facial feedback images chosen from a video recording, some of which deviated significantly from normal images. In total, 19 participants were asked to rate images of their own face (SELF) and those of others (OTHERS) according to how photogenic they appeared to be. After scanning the images, the participants rated how embarrassed they felt upon viewing each face. As the photogenic scores decreased, the embarrassment ratings dramatically increased for the participant's own face compared with those of others. The SELF versus OTHERS contrast significantly increased the activation of the right prefrontal cortex, bilateral insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and bilateral occipital cortex. Within the right prefrontal cortex, activity in the right precentral gyrus reflected the trait of awareness of observable aspects of the self; this provided strong evidence that the right precentral gyrus is specifically involved in self-face recognition. By contrast, activity in the anterior region, which is located in the right middle inferior frontal gyrus, was modulated by the extent of embarrassment. This finding suggests that the right middle inferior frontal gyrus is engaged in self-evaluation preceded by self-face recognition based on the relevance to a standard self.

LONDON (Reuters) - Unhappy clowns from around the world say a study that reported that children didn't like them has wiped the big smile from their faces, and have been falling over their large shoes to put their case.

A poll by researchers looking at what decor to put in hospital children's wards found that youngsters do not like clowns on the walls and even older ones think they are scary.

"We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable"...

"There are those who are afraid of clowns, this is unavoidable, the same way that there are those afraid of dogs and spiders," she [Heather Myers, aka PipSqueakTheClown] said.

"It is the responsibility of the clown to know his environment, and take the necessary steps when confronted with a phobia."

WASHINGTON (AP) — Apparently, raising the price really does make the wine taste better. At least that seems to be the result of a taste test. The part of the brain that reacts to a pleasant experience responded more strongly to pricey wines than cheap ones — even when tasters were given the same vintage in disguise.

Antonio Rangel and colleagues at California Institute of Technology thought the perception that higher price means higher quality could influence people, so they decided to test the idea.

They asked 20 people to sample wine while undergoing functional MRIs of their brain activity. The subjects were told they were tasting five different Cabernet Sauvignons sold at different prices.

However, there were actually only three wines sampled, two being offered twice, marked with different prices.

A $90 wine1 was provided marked with its real price and again marked $10, while another was presented at its real price of $5 and also marked $45.

The testers' brains showed more pleasure at the higher price than the lower one, even for the same wine, Rangel reports...

In their tricky fMRI experiment, the authors weren't really interested in delineating the neocortical (or subcortical) circuitry underlying marketing actions. Instead, their interest was in one particular cortical region within the frontal lobes, hypothesizing that

higher taste expectations would lead to higher activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), an area of the brain that is widely thought to encode for actual experienced pleasantness.

Lo and behold, that is what they found! Panel A shows the time course of mOFC activation, with greater BOLD signal change when consuming the cheap $5 wine disguised as a $45/bottle wine. Panel D shows with greater BOLD signal change when consuming the expensive $90/bottle wine marketed as such, and much less activity when it masquerades as the $10 wine.

Fig. 2 of Plassmann et al. (2008). Activation maps are shown at a threshold of P less than 0.001 uncorrected and with an extend threshold of five voxels.

So they've demonstrated that "pleasantness" (i.e., mOFC activity) is influenced by price. Similar activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, visual cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and cingulate gyrus for wine 1 and in the amygdala, lateral OFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior and middle temporal gyrus, and posterior cingulate cortex for wine 2 were under rug swept.

What else have we learned?

...when tasters didn't know any price comparisons, they [20 Cal Tech students] rated the $5 wine as better than any of the others sampled.

"We were shocked," Rangel said in a telephone interview. [NOTE: why were you shocked? Did you think your subjects would be wine connoisseurs?] "I think it was because the flavor was stronger and our subjects were not very experienced."

He added that wine professionals would probably be able to differentiate the better wine — "one would hope."

Plassmann H, O'Doherty J, Shiv B, Rangel A. (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Published online before print January 14, 2008.Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by individuals. We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Speaking of ethics, from the Bureau of Irresponsible Press Releases comes this headline:

Reversal Of Alzheimer's Symptoms Within Minutes In Human StudyScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.

Have any of the credulous commentators raving about this finding actually read the journal article in question? It's Open Access, so it's freely available to all when you click on a link in the Science Daily piece. Even a cursory perusal will indicate that the manuscript could not have been reviewed by anyone who follows the scientific method.

... The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF), a critical component of the brain’s immune system. Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses in the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interfere with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept[aka Enbrel, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis]. ...

The new study documents a dramatic and unprecedented therapeutic effect in an Alzheimer’s patient: improvement within minutes following delivery of perispinal etanercept, which is etanercept given by injection in the spine. Etanercept (trade name Enbrel) binds and inactivates excess TNF. Etanercept is FDA approved to treat a number of immune-mediated disorders and is used off label in the study.

Although suppressing inflammation with an anti-TNF agent may indeed be a promising treatment (e.g., Ryu & McLarnon, 2007), I think one must test its efficacy against a placebo. And what mechanism of action would mediate cognitive improvement within minutes, in a disease with complex pathology that takes years and years to develop?

The actual article (Tobinick & Gross, 2008) reads like physician's notes, not a research study or clinical trial. Here's the extent of their "immediate effect" (with absolutely no placebo condition, of course):

Ten minutes after dosing the patient was reexamined. He was noticeably calmer, less frustrated, and more attentive. He was able to correctly identify the state as California, and he identified the year as 2006. His responses to questioning seemed less effortful and more rapid, with less latency. He left for author HG's office for further testing.

See also Etanercept Improves Alzheimer's Disease In Minutes for a critical discussion of this single-case study -- including the lack of a formal research protocol, the lack of any patient selection criteria (the gentleman in question may not be a typical dementia patient), the fact that the authors patented an off-label treatment [how can they do that? was it for the perispinal route of adminstration?], and links to a video interview with family members, for starters.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Unfortunately, these particular adventures in Romania did not involve visiting Peleş Castle.

Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel, a philosophy professor at San Jose State and author of the blog Adventures in Ethics and Science, has a great two-part piece on the ethics of a developmental psychology research study conducted with abandoned Romanian children (Nelson et al., 2007) and published recently in Science. The abstract of the paper begins in a way that set off alarm bells (at least in my head):

In a randomized controlled trial, we compared abandoned children reared in institutions to abandoned children placed in institutions but then moved to foster care.Young children living in institutions were randomly assigned to continued institutional care or to placement in foster care, and their cognitive development was tracked through 54 months of age.

Tens of thousands of children grew up in Romania's institutions(BBC News)

Being neither a developmental psychologist nor an ethics expert1,I thought it best to consult a professional in at least one of those topics. The posts below are essential reading for those interested in human subjects research issues, such as informed consent, standard of care, and "clinical equipoise."

...My aim in these two posts will be to lay out the recognized ethical guidelines for research with human subjects as they apply to the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), and to identify the worries we might raise about this kind of research -- and, by extension, with the prevailing standards.

In an earlier post, I looked at a research study by Nelson et al. [1] on how the cognitive development of young abandoned children in Romania was affected by being raised in institutional versus foster care conditions. Specifically, I examined the explanation the researchers gave to argue that their work was not only scientifically sound but also ethical.

In this post, I examine the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, "The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children" [2]. Millum and Emanuel are in the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. As such, it's not unreasonable to assume that they are not coming to their understanding of this research -- and to the question of whether it rises to the appropriate ethical level -- from the point of view that good science should trump all other interests.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

If you live in New York, there's an ongoing cultural festival with numerous events that combine art, music, psychology, and neuroscience:

BRAINWAVEasks how art, music, and meditation affect the brain and offers countless answers in more than a hundred public events, ranging from an exhibition of contemporary art and a cinema series to cutting-edge concerts, performances, talks, and panels.

The group exhibition BrainWave: Common Senses responds to current neurological discourse by visualizing and investigating the brain’s capacity for perception, memory, emotion and logic—the forces that drive creativity. It brings together work by artists involved with research in cognition, artists that respond critically to the new technologies in neuroscience, and projects in which artists and scientists have collaborated to advance understanding of the mysteries of the brain.

What is the explanation for our love of music, rhythm and dance? In this evening of erudition and performance, Columbia University neuroscientists Dave Sulzer (a.k.a. composer Dave Soldier) and John Krakauer will discuss the brain activity that makes us groove to the beat of music. Krakauer co-directs the Motor Performance Laboratory and Soldier investigates synaptic connections that underlie memory, learning and behavior. Featuring the premiere of Soldier’s "Quartet for percussion and brain waves," a live performance/experiment with drummers and electroencephalographs.

Optical Illusions and the BrainSchool of Visual ArtsTuesday, January 29, 6:30pm

Secret Life of the BrainPart IV: The Adult BrainRMA Wednesday, January 30, 1 p.m.

The brain is the seat of both intellect and emotion, and this episode chronicles the critical balance between these processes and explores what happens when the balance is lost. Scientists draw insight from the stories of a stroke victim and a sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder, and break new ground in the struggle to understand and treat depression. Discussion moderator: Michael Shea, PhD.

THOUGHTS are successfully being read for the first time by scientists using nothing but a modified MRI scanner and a special computer program.

Very briefly, subjects viewed pictures of 10 different objects: 5 tools (drill, hammer, screwdriver, pliers, saw) and 5 dwellings (apartment, castle, house, hut, and igloo). Previous work had shown that these two object categories activate some unique brain regions (e.g., ventral premotor cortex and parahippocampal gyrus, respectively). Machine learning methods were used to classify the patterns of activity obtained while subjects viewed each of these pictures, with a goal of identifying individuals objects (not just the categories) by the distinctive neural activity associated with each.

But is it humans who are doing the mind-reading, or is it...is it...THE COMPUTERS!! Ahh, they're taking over!

In a small two-year study, computer scientists and cognitive neuroscientists teamed up to teach computers to recognize patterns in brain activity and identify objects that people are looking at.

Scientists call it the first step toward identifying where people's thoughts originate, while ethicists see it as a sign of the need for new public policy.

Colossus - The Forbin Project takes place in the 50s during the height of the cold war. Dr. Charles Forbin, a genius scientist who has lost trust in humanity’s ability to logically address emotional issues, has developed a very special computer to perform the Strategic Air Command and Control functions for the military. This computer, code named Colossus, is developed based on incredible advances in Artificial Intelligence, and has a logical process for determining when to launch the ICBMs. With much fanfare, the President of the US “turns on” Colossus to take over responsibility for the US nuclear armament. [from Cyberpunk Review]

"I want a complete mapping of brain states and thoughts," Dr. Just said. "We're taking tiny baby steps, but anything we can think about is represented in the brain."

In coming years, researchers will be able to develop a fairly complex mapping of brain states and thoughts, he said.

"It's a little science fiction-y, and I don't think we'll do it in one year, but five to 10 is plausible," he said.

Unfortunately, shortly after being turned on, Colossus learns the presence of another AI command and control system. It turns out that the Soviet Union, independently has developed their own system call the Guardian. Both computers “insist” that they be linked to ensure no attacks will take place...

concerned with the design and development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to "learn". ... Inductive machine learning methods extract rules and patterns out of massive data sets. The major focus of machine learning research is to extract information from data automatically, by computational and statistical methods. Hence, machine learning is closely related not only to data mining and statistics, but also theoretical computer science.

Things begin to go downhill when Professor Forbin realizes that the rate of learning for the machines is increasing at an exponential rate – he recommends detaching the connection between the two computers. When they attempt to do this, both computers threaten an immediate launch of nuclear weapons. Quickly, the government’s realize their situation – the machines are now in power. Worse, they proceed to take complete control of human society.

In the PLoS One article, Shinkareva et al. (2008) describe this approach to analyzing functional imaging data as involving

identification of a multivariate pattern of voxels and their characteristic activation levels that collectively identify the neural response to a stimulus. These machine learning methods have the potential to be particularly useful in uncovering how semantic information about objects is represented in the cerebral cortex because they can determine the topographic distribution of the activation and distinguish the content of the information in various parts of the cortex. In the study reported below, the neural patterns associated with individual objects as well as with object categories were identified using a machine learning algorithm applied to activation distributed throughout the cortex. This study also investigated the degree to which objects and categories are similarly represented neurally across different people.

And wouldn't you know it, people [Carnegie Mellon students] are people.

Carnegie Mellon University has taken an important step in mapping thought patterns in the human brain, and the research has produced an amazing insight: Human brains are similarly organized.

Based on how one person thinks about a hammer, a computer can identify when another person also is thinking about a hammer. It also can differentiate between items in the same category of tools, be it a hammer or screwdriver.

Reliable (p less than 0.001) accuracies for the classification of object exemplars within participants were reached for eleven out of twelve participants, and reliable (p less than 0.001) accuracies for the classification of object exemplars when training on the union of data from eleven participants were reached for eight out of twelve participants.

From Table 1 (Shinkareva et al., 2008). Anatomical regions (out of 71) that singly produced reliable average classification accuracies across the twelve participants for category identification.

"This part of the study establishes, as never before, that there is a commonality in how different people's brains represent the same object," said Mitchell, head of the Machine Learning Department in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science and a pioneer in applying machine learning methods to the study of brain activity. "There has always been a philosophical conundrum as to whether one person's perception of the color blue is the same as another person's. Now we see that there is a great deal of commonality across different people's brain activity corresponding to familiar tools and dwellings."

"This first step using computer algorithms to identify thoughts of individual objects from brain activity can open new scientific paths, and eventually roads and highways," added Svetlana Shinkareva, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina who is the study's lead author. "We hope to progress to identifying the thoughts associated not just with pictures, but also with words, and eventually sentences."

In contrast to this last statement are the results from a new paper (Sanai et al., 2008) showing that language representation in the brain is highly variable across individuals:

Background: Language sites in the cortex of the brain vary among patients. Language mapping while the patient is awake is an intraoperative technique designed to minimize language deficits associated with brain-tumor resection. ...Results: ...Cortical maps generated with intraoperative language data ...showed surprising variability in language localization within the dominant [left] hemisphere.

During surgery to remove gliomas, the patients in the mapping study performed three different speech/language tasks (including object naming) while various regions of cortex were stimulated to test for language deficits. Guess the neurosurgeons couldn't read their minds...

Previous studies have succeeded in identifying the cognitive state corresponding to the perception of a set of depicted categories, such as tools, by analyzing the accompanying pattern of brain activity, measured with fMRI. The current research focused on identifying the cognitive state associated with a 4s viewing of an individual line drawing (1 of 10 familiar objects, 5 tools and 5 dwellings, such as a hammer or a castle). Here we demonstrate the ability to reliably (1) identify which of the 10 drawings a participant was viewing, based on that participant's characteristic whole-brain neural activation patterns, excluding visual areas; (2) identify the category of the object with even higher accuracy, based on that participant's activation; and (3) identify, for the first time, both individual objects and the category of the object the participant was viewing, based only on other participants' activation patterns. The voxels important for category identification were located similarly across participants, and distributed throughout the cortex, focused in ventral temporal perceptual areas but also including more frontal association areas (and somewhat left-lateralized). These findings indicate the presence of stable, distributed, communal, and identifiable neural states corresponding to object concepts.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Since we're on the topic of ESP and other psi phenomena, you'll be glad to learn that the first World Telekinesis Competition will be held in Spring 2008 in Victoria, British Columbia.

Telekinesis (also known as psychokinesis) is "the process of moving or otherwise affecting physical objects by the mind only, without making any physical contact," famously employed by Shannen Dougherty's character in Charmed, the eponymous high school student in Carrie, and as one manifestation of The Force. Like many people, The Neurocritic used to dream of having telekinetic powers as a kid, and was always disappointed when I awoke and couldn't really move things around by sheer force of will.

To dream that you are telekinetic, represents a higher level of awareness and consciousness. You are not utilizing your full potential and need to start putting your stored energy levels and mental abilities to use. In other words, your dream may imply that you need to put your thoughts into action. For some, dreams of telekinetic powers may indicate your latent paranormal abilities.

What is going on here, you say? Has The Neurocritic become a Jungian? No, not really. The telekinesis competition/ performance art piece is sponsored by Noxious Sector,

an ongoing collaborative endeavor by Canadian artists Ted Hiebert, Doug Jarvis and Jackson 2Bears, dedicated to the exploration of alternative cognitive function, the paranormal and the absurd. Conceived as a formalized forum for informal inquiry, Noxious Sector projects take the form of performances, curatorial initiatives and artistic collaborations.

Magnetically Inclined is a performance and documentary project exploring the relationship between brainwaves and high-powered earth magnets. Currently in developmental stages, this project will include various magnetic interventions into such brain wave activities as dreaming, meditating and concentration exercises.

Psychologists at Harvard University have developed a new method to study extrasensory perception that, they argue, can resolve the century-old debate over its existence. According to the authors, their study not only illustrates a new method for studying such phenomena, but also provides the strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of extrasensory perception, or ESP.

The research was led by Samuel Moulton, a graduate student in the department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University with Stephen Kosslyn, John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard... The scientists used brain scanning to test whether individuals have knowledge that cannot be explained through normal perceptual processing.

Oh my. Where to start? What was the motivation for such a study (other than getting media attention or perhaps to be nominated for an Ig Nobel Award)?

Despite widespread public belief in such phenomena and over 75 years of experimentation, there is no compelling evidence that psi exists. In the present study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used in an effort to document the existence of psi. If psi exists, it occurs in the brain, and hence, assessing the brain directly should be more sensitive than using indirect behavioral methods (as have been used previously).

And why, oh why, do the authors assume that psi occurs in the brain? Believers will not be swayed, because extrasensory perception must be extracerebral!!

main objective is to encourage the scientific study of Man, from both the physical and spiritual perspectives, by honouring, supporting and promoting the work and efforts of all those who seek out new paths along the route of Research, Science and Knowledge.

In the present experiment, we operationalize the psi hypothesis by asking the following question: Does the brain respond selectively to psi stimuli? By "psi stimuli" we mean stimuli that not only are presented through the usual senses (e.g., visually), but also are presented telepathically (mind to mind), clairvoyantly (world to mind), and precognitively (future to present); by "non-psi stimuli," we mean identical stimuli that are only presented through normal sensory channels. Under the null hypothesis, these psi and non-psi stimuli are one and the same (because the additional aspects of psi stimuli do not in fact exist) and thus should evoke indistinguishable neuronal responses. Under the psi hypotheses, the stimuli are categorically different and should evoke different neuronal responses.

...On the one hand, psi might provide participants with specific, implicit knowledge of stimuli. In this case, we would expect a suppressed brain response to psi stimuli compared to non-psi stimuli... On the other hand, psi might increase participants' attention to stimuli without providing them with stimulus-specific content. In this case, we would expect an enhanced brain response to psi stimuli, given the evidence that attention enhances brain activity. In the present experiment, we tested for suppression effects, enhancement effects, or some combination thereof (with different effects in different brain areas). By hypothesizing merely a difference in activation—without specifying a direction or neuroanatomical locus—we make minimal assumptions about psi and offer the broadest possible test of the psi hypothesis.

Figure 1 (from Moulton & Kosslyn, 2008) A schematic of one trial. In this trial for the receiver, the non-psi stimulus appears first and the psi stimulus second. The third stimulus presentation (feedback) in each trial is always the same as the psi stimulus. The sender sees only the psi stimulus for each trial.

Title:“Mystical experience, thin boundaries, and transhumanation as predictors of psychokinetic performance with a Random Number Generator”Researchers: Dr. Michael ThalbourneInstitution: Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, University of Adelaide (Australia)

Parapsychology is the scientific investigation of apparently paranormal mental phenomena (such as telepathy, i.e., "mind reading"), also known as psi. Despite widespread public belief in such phenomena and over 75 years of experimentation, there is no compelling evidence that psi exists. In the present study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used in an effort to document the existence of psi. If psi exists, it occurs in the brain, and hence, assessing the brain directly should be more sensitive than using indirect behavioral methods (as have been used previously). To increase sensitivity, this experiment was designed to produce positive results if telepathy, clairvoyance (i.e., direct sensing of remote events), or precognition (i.e., knowing future events) exist. Moreover, the study included biologically or emotionally related participants (e.g., twins) and emotional stimuli in an effort to maximize experimental conditions that are purportedly conducive to psi. In spite of these characteristics of the study, psi stimuli and non-psi stimuli evoked indistinguishable neuronal responses—although differences in stimulus arousal values of the same stimuli had the expected effects on patterns of brain activation. These findings are the strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of paranormal mental phenomena.

The five symbols developed by Dr. Karl Zener for use in tests of extrasensory perception.

In the early 1930s, a Swiss psychologist named Zener, a partner of Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, designed a set of cards bearing five symbols which he felt were sufficiently different from one another that they would be ideal for conducting certain tests, among them extrasensory perception (ESP) tests. These symbols are: circle, plus sign, wavy lines, square, and star.

About Me

Born in West Virginia in 1980, The Neurocritic embarked upon a roadtrip across America at the age of thirteen with his mother. She abandoned him when they reached San Francisco and The Neurocritic descended into a spiral of drug abuse and prostitution. At fifteen, The Neurocritic's psychiatrist encouraged him to start writing as a form of therapy.